I had though of overclocking the card but it has a stock cooler on it and it is noisy enough as it is, I priced an Artic cooler for it and that was about £50 and to me that is a bit too much as it could to towards a new card, any idea when the series 8 is due out as i would like to stick to AMD as long as there is an AMD.

I think it's just nerdurge, I have just upgraded the mobo processor ram and put in an ssd so as you said nerdurge. I have no problems playing Skyrim or any other game, I have stuck to 12.8 drivers as i noticed skyrim got glitchy with the latest ones. I think it's time to wait till series 8.

And it DOES indicate a decent performance jump, but probably not enough to be noticeable in most cases. Don't like the fact that they are testing against two different MBs & chipsets (P67 PCIe 2.0 vs. Z77 PCIe 3.0).

If you're dying to have some kinda nerdgasm and spend a little bit on your rig then consider upgrading from onboard audio to something a little more "refined"... I'm sure you'll notice the difference if you use even semi-decent headphones or a amp/receiver of some kind.

Something like THIS would be pretty nice looking sat in your rig and sound awesome too.

Also, rip out the 6970 and clean the heatsink and while your at it, repaste it too.... if its been around for a while and you havent done this recently you could see some marginal temp decreases allowing room for that OC talked about earlier at no fan speed increase due to a more efficient cooler on the card.

Hi I did have an xfi fatality about 6 years ago but I found out I wasn't using everything that came with it so I got rid of it and I found that onboard sound was quite good, I don't know about present day cards. I will keep the 11.11c drivers in mind.

Hi decided to take cover of Graphics card and I repasted it with some Zalman thermal grease that i had left from the cpu cooler, and i cleaned the fan as much as i could then put it all back together again temps went down a little but now when i play skyrim the fan sounds as if it is going into overdrive especially when the graphics get busy, any ideas or is the fan nackered.

I was thinking of getting one of these Arctic Accelero Xtreme Plus II VGA Cooler as the cards fan got rather noisy last night, I think what doesn't help is the heating in the house plus the tower is right next to the cupboard where the central heating system is,it would cut the noise down and there is quite a bit of life in the card if not for me for somebody else.

hi the fan was noisy before but i thought cleaning it may help but it has got louder maybe i should try a better quality thermal paste and i will look at alternative coolers, i wouldn't bother but i think the card has some life in it yet.